The blog formerly known as Holistic Learning ... Enki and Waldorf Homeschooling

Monday, September 26, 2011

Ancient Greece I Day 1

We began the morning with grammar and math; I realized right off why public schools always start the year with math review because clearly we need some review on math facts and the four processes. Our grammar unit is on prepositional phrases, which I have always found easy so I hope it goes well for my boys.

Our main lesson assignment was to draw a map of ancient Greece. I knew that wasn't going to go over well this early in the year so we compromised and I printed a nice map for them to color (which they haven't yet). We moved on to learning about olive trees and the importance of olives in ancient Greece. The boys drew olive trees in the main lesson books.

J-Baby put some care into his drawing but still really doesn't buy into the idea of doing his best work in his main lesson book, at least not when it comes to writing. One of my goals this year is too significantly improve the boys penmanship through daily practice as well as higher expectations on my part. It is no longer enough for me to know that they are at least trying to write; now that I know they can we have to work on making it neater and straighter.

Our "afternoon" lesson for this block is cooking/eating the foods of ancient Greece. Having not gotten to the store we couldn't actually cook anything, but we used olive oil at lunch and had Kalamata olives at dinner. Later this week we'll buy some Greek yogurt, some honey, some feta cheese, and the like.